THE ITAL­IAN PEN­CIL THAT DREW THE NEW SPIDER-MAN

Sara Pichelli, born 1983 in the prov­ince of Fermo (Marche) is the Ital­ian comic book artist best known for first il­lus­trat­ing the Miles Mo­rales ver­sion of ‘Ul­ti­mate Spider-man’ writ­ten by Brian Michael Bendis. Today she re­ally likes comics like Sand­man by Neil Gaiman, any­thing by Alan Moore, and, as far as Ital­ian ar con­cerned, Ze­ro­cal­care and Leo Or­tolani; but her first love was an­i­ma­tion, and she started her ca­reer work­ing for IDW Pub­lish­ing. She started draw­ing comics as self-taught il­lus­tra­tor and, in 2008, she won Mar­vel’s only in­ter­na­tional con­test for young tal­ents. Af­ter hav­ing worked on sev­eral Mar­vel ti­tles, such as Namora, Pichelli was hired as the main artist on the sec­ond vol­ume of ‘Ul­ti­mate Comics: Spider-man’, which pre­miered in Septem­ber 2011 and fea­tured Miles Mo­rales, a teenager of Black His­panic de­scent, who in­her­ited the cos­tume of Spider-man af­ter Peter Parker’s death. In 2011, she also won a 2011 Ea­gle Award for Fa­vorite New­comer Artist.

For Pichelli, the world of comics is in­creas­ingly open­ing to women, also thanks to cinecomics, which, how­ever, “are in­flu­enc­ing comics too much, be­com­ing a leash for cre­ative free­dom.” How­ever, the artist con­fesses that she loved the Ital­ian ‘They Called Jeeg’: “I found it to be a per­fect para­ble of a present-day hero that man­aged to in­still the su­per-hero code in our cul­ture with­out turn­ing it into a char­ac­ter. I forced my stu­dents from the In­ter­na­tional School of Comics in Rome to watch it, and I also in­vite them to read a lot be­cause comics are nar­ra­tive, they tell sto­ries.” Pichelli’s dream is to make a hor­ror car­toon with a fe­male pro­tag­o­nist.